"I've already pulled all the com traffic from these eleven addresses, and my ship is applying the ciphers to them, decoding them and putting them in chronological order. Makes for some interesting reading."

"You're tossing this out like it's no big deal, but this is a huge development in the war effort," Jackson said. "Have you passed this up the chain?"

"To who? The same corrupt CIS that gave them the boxes to begin with? For right now, I think it's best to let you have it first, and then I'll send it to Director Perez. From there, it's his problem."

"Fair enough. That's your game not mine. What's the main thrust of what you've found so far?" Jackson asked.

"Trapp appears to be very well-connected within this core cabal of player," Pike said. "I've got people digging into her background but, so far, all we've found is her records appear to be falsified, and it must have been done by pros for it to slip through the Starfleet screening process.

"Anyway, she's no bit player. She's seems to be a serious operative, but probably not privy to information that would compromise her bosses. From what I can tell, and I'm reading a lot between the lines, she was going to try and flip Alto Hardy. It was the main reason she'd gotten herself assigned to the Jericho with a secondary goal of discovering and stealing a suspected superluminal communications system the Federation had deployed."

"Captain Hardy?" Jackson mused. "He wasn't an especially ambitious officer when it came to playing fleet politics, but he suddenly found himself on the bridge of the Federation's flagship. It tracks. If she could turn Hardy, she'd have control of a major strategic asset, as well as a source of highly classified intel. What's this cabal I keep hearing about? Marcum mentioned them, too."

"This is where it gets a little murky for me," Pike admitted. "From other captured assets, we've figured out there's a sort of shadow council operating within the Alliance Council. It's made up of some key power players, including our buddy, Zhang. They're also the ones who have been funding and controlling Vadim Kohl. He's not actually operating with any official authority from the Council, but they'll be damned if they admit they've got a rogue element out there blowing up planets. You know how the Asianic Union was about clamping down on news like that."

"You're kidding!" Jackson said. "The son of a bitch is running rogue?"

"Technically, but he does answer to this cabal—I hate that word…we need to figure out what their secret club's name is—and they seem to be working to steer ESA policy," Pike said. "Like I said…murky."

"Do we have any practical data? Either from your dispatch intercepts or the other prisoners the CIS has nabbed?"

"Let's see… We know they have a lot of those starfighters you ran into in the Odmena System, but you blew up one of only two carriers. The ESA has almost limitless raw materials, but their industrial base is about a century and a half behind ours. It takes them two to three times as long to complete a ship as it does us, and that's not even counting the Mickey program." Pike leaned back and looked through the hatch of the bridge when there was a particularly loud crash and excited squeals. Jackson just smiled at the sounds of his children driving the Agent crazy.